Are After-Work Drinks a Conspiracy Against Women?

After-work drinks, second only to working breakfasts, are one of the great nuisances of office life—particularly when they’re planned, and in fields where they’re quasi-mandatory.

Photograph by ANDY RAIN / EPA

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is not the easiest guy to love. He is, as Sam Knight wrote, “an old-fashioned lefty” who believes that Britain should surrender its nuclear arms and withdraw from NATO. He makes a show of having to wear a tie. He has been willing to cut off the electoral prospects of his party to spite its more moderate wing. Even his supporters admit that he can be maddeningly callow. As the Timesreported, “At crucial moments, they say, he is often unavailable, growing vegetables or making jam, two of his hobbies.” You can very easily imagine him bragging about not owning a TV.

Last week, Corbyn, who is running for reëlection as Labour Party leader, unveiled “Working with Women,” a manifesto vowing to combat sexism. He wants to do some commendable things: work toward universal free child care, require companies to publish equal-pay audits, update sex education. If reëlected, he says, he will make his cabinet fifty per cent women. But it was a stray and uncharacteristically worldly comment of Corbyn’s that ended up dominating the headlines: “The behavior of companies that encourages an ethic of after-work socialization in order to promote themselves within the company benefits men, who don’t feel the need to be at home looking after their children, and it discriminates against women who want to, obviously, look after the children that they’ve got.”

Corbyn’s detractors—which is to say, basically anyone who isn’t explicitly a Corbyn supporter—pounced. Was he an idiot? Did he really just call a quick lager in the pub “an ethic of after-work socialization?” (Many papers reported that Corbyn wanted to “ban” after-work drinks.) He was sexist, suggesting that fathers neglected their kids and mothers neglected everything else. In a sentence, he’d managed to alienate almost everyone from casual drinkers to hands-on dads to non-reclusive mothers. The verdict, per usual: Jeremy Corbyn, kind of a dick.

But, wait. A small, annoying voice was mounting deep in the consciousness of one working mother. “Might it be possible that I somehow find myself agreeing with Jeremy Corbyn?” it nagged. “Did I just refer to myself as a ‘working mother’?” True, it was not the most pressing labor issue of our age, but, the thing was, Corbyn was right. One didn’t want to have to go for a pint with the messenger in order to admit that after-work drinks, second only to working breakfasts, are one of the great nuisances of office life.

Nobody likes them, really—particularly when they’re planned, and in fields where they’re quasi-mandatory. They can be awkward. (Stick to the weather. Save the umbrella drink you’re craving for Saturday night.) They constitute an unpaid extension of the work day; they encroach upon things like family life and drinking with people with whom you don’t share a copier; they inevitably involve two and a half glasses of really bad white wine and arriving home to an empty refrigerator with bar-nut dust all over your fingers.

That’s if you don’t have kids. If you do, and if you have to get a babysitter and take a taxi home, they’re potentially a three-figure disaster. In saying so, Corbyn was attempting to address an instance of structural sexism in the workplace. It is true that, in general, it’s less complicated for men to go to the bar with colleagues, and that women disproportionately bear the costs of having to stay late at work, whether for a meeting or a margarita. Where Corbyn went wrong was in his suggestion that this state of affairs is due to an emotional discrepancy between the sexes. It’s not that mothers necessarily “want” to be home any more than men want to be away from it; it’s that, due to a number of factors—chief among them the gender pay gap—more often than not, they have to be. Even so, Corbyn’s critics pointed out, the institution of tippling with colleagues is never going to go away. There’s really only one solution, then: drinking during the workday.

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.